![]() Acme splashes vanishing ink onto Eddie’s shirt, and at that moment articulates the film’s central motif of the mysterious ambiguity that pervades not just seeing but feeling. ![]() The world of L.A./Toontown is structured according to these precepts, shaped by characters hiding behind walls, inside washing sinks, moving through secret doorways, yet never fully out of the camera’s sight a witty metaphor for this duality can be found in the scene where Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins), the film’s melancholic, whisky-dipso private eye, meets with Marvin Acme (Stubby Kaye), the owner of Acme Corporation and Toontown, in an underground nightclub. Right after the film’s opening, where we see the clumsy and playful Roger wreaking havoc in his bid to take care of little Baby Herman, Zemeckis shatters the boundaries between on- and off-set, employing a reflexivity that proves definitive of both the film’s fictional setting of 1947 Toontown and the audience’s experience of the contradictions between what’s visible and not. Wolf’s mystery novel), one can never take for granted how the source material would be molded and redefined in the hands of a visionary like Zemeckis. Even though Who Framed Roger Rabbit has a clear point of origin (it was adapted from Gary K. This search has led Zemeckis to formulate not only a uniquely jovial interpretation of film (neo-)noir - family-friendly visualism canvassed over the latter’s aesthetic grittiness - but also straddle, in terms of escapist entertainment, the fine line between hard-boiled pulp fiction and comic strip narrative. In fact, it’s apparent that the film’s very premise divulges its search for a more intrinsic connection between live-action and cartoon. ![]() Although its huge box office success - Who Framed Roger Rabbit was the second-highest-grossing film of the year - paved the way for the posterior, and perhaps more popular, cultural phenomenon of Space Jam, the laborious production process and financial unpredictability of the genre has curtailed its induction into the American, and perhaps global, cinematic consciousness as a ubiquitous fixture.īut considering Zemeckis’ work in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, one could make the claim that the synthesis of these two modes of filmmaking goes beyond either spectacle or commercialism. It wasn’t until 1988 when Robert Zemeckis’ Who Framed Roger Rabbit premiered, however, that a feature live-action-cum-animated film proved itself simultaneously as a technical marvel and groundbreaking filmic achievement of singular prestige and quality. ![]() Such a composition responds to the secret desires, of both adults and children, to live among their imaginary childhood friends in some surreal world. In the wake of the early experiments of Georges Meliès, Max Fleischer, or Dudley Murphy’s Danse Macabre during the silent era, it would not be just Walt Disney who would dream of combining the representational aspects of our human world with the imaginary facets of cartoons (like in Alice Comedies ) every so often, viewers could be immersed in dreamy, fantasy-like states wherein a beloved star like Gene Kelly would share the screen with an amicably animated character such as Jerry Mouse in George Sidney’s Anchors Aweigh. Even though, to many audiences today, the eclecticism of live-action and animation may appear as a sort of a postmodernist achievement in the realm of film, the truth is that this mélange is actually as old as the history of cinema itself.
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